Since that day last spring when an ominous parade of vehicles flying black-and-white flags
advanced toward Mosul, many of us, myself certainly included, have wondered exactly who these
barbarous men are. Almost immediately, we were treated to photos of their beheadings, of mass
executions and just about every savagery we thought we had left behind.

Oh, we knew who the “terrorists” themselves were — and by that I mean the kind of young,
eternally disaffected, violent kids from Raffa, Tripoli or Cairo who man the machine guns and grin
idiotically at death. They are al-Qaida in New York writ large, or, in earlier days, the Palestine
Liberation Organization in Beirut, or the Red Brigades in Berlin.

But their old tactics are no longer what are to be feared. Today, what we need to know is who
are the older, more mature and darker forces who are organizing, training and disciplining the boys
riding the buses with the black-and-white flags across the north of Iraq. The maturity that these
forces are illustrating is what must be defined, delineated — and defeated.

Since there remains relatively little written comprehensively on this question — the lines of
trucks and buses seemed to hit the Iraqi city of Mosul as if out of the blue — I dug as far as I
could, and this is what I found:

First, what we more or less know is that the group calling itself the Islamic State had its
birth after the “Arab Spring,” which seemed to offer so much hope, but which metastasized so
dangerously to Syria three years ago. There, in a country totally at war with itself, the world
knew little of what was happening in Syria’s desert sands and ancient cities.

As Islamic State formed within that relatively closed conflict, it was at first just another of
the militias eager to overthrow the vilified president, Bashar Assad. In fact, it developed and
grew out of the al-Qaida that destroyed the twin towers in New York in 2001. But the Islamic State
group quickly became so much more vicious and cruel that even al-Qaida rejected it.

“The process … actually began as early as mid- to late 2009,” Charles Lister, an analyst of
terrorist groups at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center told PBS’
Frontline recently. “It was at that point that the Islamic State was in some ways forced
to devolve into a typical terrorist organization. … It relocated much of its central leadership to
(the Iraqi city of) Mosul, which was a relative safe zone. …

“Within 12 months, it had very dramatically increased the frequency of its bombings … It had
begun to recover the professionalism, or the professional level of its senior military leadership,
and it was regaining sources of intelligence on local security forces, local government officials —
most of which it has since used extraordinarily well and to its benefit in the last year or so, and
which were almost certainly fundamentally important to facilitating the group’s capture of Mosul,
for instance.”

In short, they are the men from the Iraqi army that the United States so foolishly disbanded
when it invaded in 2003.

But exactly who were those “senior military leaders” that not only Lister but other leading
analysts refer to now as they attempt to make sense of what is happening?

They are the former soldiers and officers of Saddam Hussein’s army. They include a well-known
organization of former Iraqi army officers, the “Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order.”

Almost all of them also were members of the Arab Baath Party, the former governing party of Iraq
and part of a vast quasi-reformist movement from World War II onward that was designed to reform
the entire Middle East, but only came to hold power in Syria and Iraq.

They, too, were the leading men and women — in the entire society — that the U.S. also so
thoughtlessly disbanded when it invaded Iraq.

But now members of both of these groups, which after all made up the vast majority of Iraqis
before we invaded, have come to light again. Is it surprising that they apparently make up the
majority of the Islamic State group that is out to kill Americans?

Their presence on the scene is important because, as Charles Lister said, “The Islamic State
relies on a Baathist sense of social legitimacy in the Sunni areas of the country, and the
Baathists rely on the Islamic State being able to spearhead offensive operations.”

And so it seems that the U.S. is now fighting exactly those Iraqis that it could have so easily
led or co-opted when it invaded. So, what do we do this time around?